1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates generally to the field of social web sites on global computer networks and in particular to a system and method for managing information personal to individual users of social web sites.
2. Statement of the Problem
The Internet started as an information source and communication tool, and these functions remain important aspects of the Internet. It is also a truism that the Internet is a powerful sales tool. Companies that provide useful internet services have cash flows of more then ten billion dollars a year, much of which comes from advertising. The Internet has become the most important medium for distribution of music, and is rapidly becoming the most important medium for distribution of videos. The Internet has also become an important vehicle for telecommunications, including telephone communication. Because the Internet lends itself to immediate feedback to advertisers and service providers, new Internet uses, such as directed advertising are rapidly evolving.
The Internet has also grown to become an important social network. From one point of view, the Internet is the largest social network on the planet. Moreover, on a more explicit level, there are scores, if not hundreds of social network sites on the Internet, and millions of blogs. Social network sites are defined as web sites or applications that provide people with designated relationships to each other access to information that is not available to others who do not have such designated relationships. Because the Internet can be accessed from a myriad of points, such as desktop computers connected to wires, laptop computers connected to wireless networks, hand-helds, cell phones, and integrated products such as Ipods™, for many individuals, the Internet has become their primary means of communication. The explicit social web sites encourage individuals to share their ideas, experiences and thoughts with their friends, sometimes on an hourly or more frequent basis. These social web sites are uniquely different from conventional informational and shopping web sites in that they provide interactions between the web site users, and not just between the web site and individual users. The actions on these web sites are more complex, including actions such as adding a contact, deleting a contact, sending a message to a contact, inviting, such as to a social event, blocking, staring, which also is called bookmarking or placemarking, depending on the web site, linking as in assigning an attribute or giving credit, set a trust level, and voting.
The Internet permits individuals to live in many different social circles that would not be available without the Internet. Many individuals even have multiple identities on the Internet. These social aspects of the Internet have given rise to problems. Brad Fitzpatrick and David Recordon have recognized the problem associated with multiple identities. See bradfittz.com/social-graph-problem/. Generally, in discussions of the Internet and, in particular in this disclosure, the term “graph” means the relationship between disperse items of information. In this disclosure, an individual's identity graph is a record of the relationship between the various items of information relating to that individual that are available on the Internet. An Internet user's social graph is a record of the user's internet relationships to other individual users of the Internet.
While the Internet has come a long ways in its development, it is generally believed that the Internet is still in its infancy, and many more uses for the Internet will be developed in the future, and the social integration of the Internet into society will continue to expand.
Despite it usefulness, and perhaps because of it, problems have developed that present serious roadblocks to its further evolution of the Internet. Even without consciously trying to assume different identities, the need for each web site to have an identification or tracking function, the ubiquity of cookies and other feedback methods, the ease of access, the varieties of access, and the proliferation of web sites and social functioning has resulted in even the average person having many different Internet identities. Thus, what the internet records as multiple individuals may actually be a single individual. This makes it difficult to gather reliable information for advertising, sales, sales compensation and other business purposes.
The existence of the millions of people, each sharing information with others on scores or even hundreds of social websites, blogs, and other websites, and each with a myriad of identities, the Internet is often overwhelmed with electronic traffic. It is well known that many popular websites regularly crash under the weight of such traffic.
Another problem that has arisen is that it is impossible for the Internet user's identity graph and social graph to travel with them. Information pertaining to an individual's identity and social relationships are not portable—parts and pieces are locked away in different places on the Internet, all in different and incompatible formats and obeying different rules. As a result, users are forced to enter the same information over and over again. Furthermore, the various web sites and services themselves are all forced to recreate similar infrastructures to collect information about their users and their user's relationships to one another. As stated by the author's quote above, “Unfortunately, there does not exist a single social graph that is comprehensive and decentralized.”
All of the above problems are particularly exacerbated in social network sites. The key purpose of such sites is social networking, and if a user's identity is not known or varies, such social networking becomes difficult to impossible. Moreover, reconnecting among friends on new social network sites is laborious and thus seriously impedes social networking.
A “solution” to the above is embodied in web sites where an individual can enter the names, addresses, telephone numbers, email addresses and other data on his or her “contacts”, and the web site periodically accesses the email addresses and sends a message to each contact asking that the contact update the information. This just passes the drudgery of entering data to others. In fact, since most of the requests for updating are unnecessary because the information has not changed, this “solution” just multiplies Internet traffic and adds to the myriad emails that one must delete each day.
For the above and other reasons, it would be highly desirable if a method and apparatus were available that made personal identity graphs more portable and provided a readily available and portable social graph for an individual in a way that required little or no drudgery of data entry for anyone. If this could be done in a way that increased the efficiency of the Internet, or even resulted in reduced Internet traffic, this would indeed be a breakthrough that would suddenly make social web sites more manageable and open new avenues for development of such sites.